//Josh Ford//

So I’m still enjoying maple after having come back to play about a month ago, I’ve been on pretty consecutively lately and I’m back to feeling comfortable in the game again.

Quite a bit has happened in the past month, to start things off we had a Pink Bean trial run about 2-3 weeks back, and before I say anything else I need to mention that there is not one consolidated group in all of gMS with the high HP required to kill PB. He does 18-19k damage, and unless you’ve spent over 1600$ on HP washing a ranged character, you will not be able to survive the fight(as of now). So back to the run – we decided to see how far we could go this time around, since the last time we went we had practically no time left and barely made it into the last phase. Now for those of you that don’t know, the Pink Bean fight is split up into 6 phases, Phase 1 is the statue on the far left, Phase 2 is the statue from phase 1 + the statue on the far right, Phase 3 is 3 statues, and so on, up until Phase 6 where all the statues are finally dead and the real fight with Pink Bea occurs. Regarding our most recent trial run, we DID make it to the 6th Phase, and we happened to have a little over 19 minutes to fight him, so we were going to see what kind of damage we could inflict on him, but pretty much 90% of our ranged attackers died immediately, myself included. I’ve uploaded a video to youtube of the fight, see below. 🙂

Part 1:

Part 2:

Moving on from pink bean, I’ve been training and enjoying my Aran character quite a bit lately. As of my last post the character(Wyndow) was level 50 but now I’m sitting at lv. 91 and the character continues to get more and more fun – I might even continue playing it on into 4th job. It’s really quite hard to say what I’ll play and when I”ll do it, the future is so unpredictable and I have no idea what may or may not come up in the next few months.

For those of you that are wondering, my training on my Aran went from the following places:

1-13 on Rien
14-16 on Pigs or other misc Victoria monsters
17-22 on Dark Stumps
22-24 in Ant Tunnel
24-30 on Sand Rats and Iron Mutae
30-41 at CPQ
41-55 at Cars in Singapore and MP3 in Singapore
56-63 at Wind Raiders
63-83 at Storm Breakers
83-91(current) at Galloperas.

I’m expecting to stay at Gallos until mid to late 10x, we’ll see how that goes. The Aran is alot of fun, and maybe I’ll release a training video of it sometime – my creativity is still itching.

There was a new patch a few days ago, and with it came the release of the Kerning Market and Neo City(The extremely crappy and weak version of Neo Tokyo). I’ve always liked the art style of the Neo Tokyo, and since City is just a nerfed knockoff I figured it would look the same – it does, and it’s quite a nice place to go. As for Kerning market I believe it is a very low level place and high levels cannot enter but I could be mistaken, I just haven’t tried it yet. Very much of the high level community of MapleStory were upset with the release of Neo City, and not Neo Tokyo – Neo Tokyo has some very cool monsters to fight, that are not only strong and difficult, but also fun. One of the original boss fights consists of a 0 gravity room where you’re practically fighting a boss like you’re underwater – unfortunately we didn’t even get that in Neo City, not even with a weaker version of the boss. The entire area has been a disappoint to me besides the artwork – the monsters and maps and backgrounds are phenomenal, and I wish Neo City were a place I’d ever be going back to(but I won’t). I finished all the quests there yesterday and there is absolutely no reason to go back, the monsters don’t have 100k+ hp and high exp like they do in the original, so they’re not monsters I’ll ever train on. The boss is not something I’ll ever hunt, and you cannot forge the high level and very strong weapons that the original Neo Tokyo released. All in all if you’re under level 110-120 you’ll probably get a kick out of the new place, and maybe even get some good experience out of it as well.

Horntail has been going well, last night we had to do only 1 run since we happened to lose all of our bishops but 1 to disconnections, the seduce was kind of scary(I was in the party with no Bish), luckily we killed the dragon quickly enough for no harm to have come out of the Seduce – Hero’s Will was option B. 🙂

At the moment the login server is down and I’m eagerly awaiting it to come back up again – this game has sunk its teeth into me once again, and I’m having alot of fun(despite the toothmarks). I have Final Exams next week and I should really begin studying, I have an exam review tonight, we’ll see how pressing and difficult the exams will be – I should be fine though, and if they seem to be more difficult and require more time than I expected…. Well, you won’t see me for a while then, not until they’re done and gone.